In farming operations it is often desirable to obtain a sample from a standing crop (or one which has been swathed) before determining whether or not conditions are suitable for combining and the most important feature is whether or not the moisture content of the grain is below an acceptable level for harvesting. In the past, farmers have normally rubbed out a sample by hand and this is extremely laborious and time consuming and furthermore not necessarily accurate as to moisture content because of body heat and moisture of the person doing the sampling. An alternative to the foregoing is to take a full size combine to the field, thresh a portion of the grain and retrieve a sample from the hopper. This is time consuming as well as expensive and difficult and wasteful in that perhaps more is collected than required. In large scale farming operations the crop to be harvested is also in many instances quite some distance from the buildings where the combines are kept.
A state of the art search has failed to reveal any equivalent machines for Applicant's intended purpose. However, in the very early development of threshing devices some were portable and as examples of such, attention is directed to: Canadian Pat. Nos. 177,675-issued June 19, 1917; 287,459-issued Feb. 26, 1929; and 316,060-issued Oct. 13, 1931.
The foregoing disclosed devices, while portable, do not have the required portability for sampling, and were intended for threshing complete crops.
A principal object of the present invention is to provide a machine designed to thresh enough grain for a moisture test, be totally portable and capable of being carried by hand and have enough capacity to thresh a sample of grain, as well as separate the kernels from chaff.